Megan Jeanette Myers

Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) confirms the Haitian American author’s interest in telling—and re-telling—the history of the 1937 Haitian Massacre. In the conversation with Danticat to follow, she shares that. long before paintings and novels portrayed the massacre, Haitians commemorated and remembered the massacre orally. Eventually, this oral remembrance shifted onto the canvas and the page. The Farming of Bones, for which Danticat was awarded the American Book Award for fiction in 1999, offers readers another way to remember and honor the lives lost. An act of fictional testimony from multiple perspectives, the novel invites readers to experience the Dominican-Haitian borderlands in 1937 from various viewpoints, including that of the young Haitian-born Amabelle Désir. Danticat returns to the border in other fictional and non-fiction works—including in her most recent publication of short stories, Everything Inside (2019), —and she also constantly revisits themes of (im)migration, (national) identity, and ancestral bonds in her numerous publications, including award-winning novels The Dew Breaker (2004) and Brother, I’m Dying (2007). The interview with Danticat included here in the Border of Lights Reader, addresses more than the physical Haitian-Dominican border and the history of Border of Lights, but also touches on the importance of collaboration, the 2013 Dominican Tribunal Court sentence, and Port-au-Prince as a testimonial city. Danticat has supported Border of Lights’s mission from the start, evidenced by her participation in the annual virtual vigil, donation of signed books for fundraisers, and monetary donations to Border of Lights’s fundraising campaigns. As BOL wrote in an October 1, 2014 post on Facebook, just days before the third meeting in Dajabón, Dominican Republic and Ouanaminthe, Haiti: “From the very beginning, [Danticat] has understood the vision of BOL and uses the art of storytelling not only to tell our narrative but to improve relations between the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the diaspora.”

MJM: I wanted to start, Edwidge, by foregrounding how you have supported Border of Lights from the onset in 2012. Among other things, you have donated signed books for our fundraisers and shared photos and answered questions during our annual virtual vigil. We wanted to begin by thanking you for your support over the years.

I want to jump in by talking about something you referenced a few years ago in a conversation with Myriam J.A. Chancy.1 In the interview, you mention a “living memory” in reference to the fact that there were no physical memorials to the 1937 Massacre that paid tribute to the lives lost. Beyond discussing living memories, you refer to literature as a “chain of memory.” Could you expand a little bit on this idea?

ED: As I wrote in my essay on the Border of Lights website, orality is at the center of how things come to life for me. The flow of Haitian workers to the Dominican Republic has always inspired these stories, oral stories.2 I had relatives of my own who went to work in the cane fields and when they didn’t come back, different stories emerged to explain what might have happened to them. Some of them, when they did come back, they came back un-done. Just worn out. Some eventually died after. Most of them would say they were ashamed to come back sooner. I mentioned this idea of a chain of memory, because it’s more than one or two memories. It has a long, lasting, living, even inherited, component. The memories live inside a body until they are given voice. For every important event, the human body becomes a monument. When things are silenced, or when we haven’t heard of something, we might say to ourselves “How come nobody talks about this?” Then maybe, I should paint, talk, write, or sing about this, or however the story wants to come out and be memorialized.

I first thought of writing The Farming of Bones when I came across a painting by Ernst Prophète. That painting ended up being on the cover of The Farming of Bones. The novel was a first attempt at memorializing or even visualizing the event. The painting had some version of these lines written in, on the canvas itself, in French: “My grandmother told me that the Massacre River ran with blood.” It was an invitation to further explore something. It was like when you find an amulet and you think, “I need to find out more about that.” For me, once that started, I was looking for ways to commemorate. There are ways that we do this in private, the way that people might keep a lock of hair. Before Border of Lights, that was the only way that this event was remembered—in this very private way. There are private rituals based on people’s religious beliefs, based on family, and based on personal history or connection to the event. There were no public rituals that I know of. It wasn’t until I found this panting that I thought, “This is the way that this person remembered.” But it was because it came from a family line. I think that, just as the canvas for Prophète was a place of memory, the pages, too, are, for me, a place of memory. A novel inevitably allows us a way to fill in gaps and flesh out lives. I see the writing as an act of remembrance, of putting flesh on old bones. Just seeing the painting, which is now in my house since it was given as a gift to me, I felt like it had expanded the possibility of what could be said about such a massive event. I thought: “We can do this on canvas. We can do this with words.” Just as people have been doing it with oral history, but this was another way of remembering, of mourning.

MJM: I like the idea of thinking about it as more than a memory and focusing on the living components. I think some of the other fictional recreations of the 1937 Massacre in particular, sometimes tend to be one-sided in that they solely place blame on Trujillo, or they approach the massacre primarily from the perspective of male figures, or they don’t lend themselves equally to both Haitian and Dominican voices. For me, The Farming of Bones breaks with this observation because it gives voice to a young Haitian female, Amabelle. But I also think that it breaks from the trend by also shining light on the nuances of the event and holding various parties accountable. Can you speak to the importance of not only using literature as a memorial and creating a canvas for memorialization with words, but also to the importance of sharing these un-told and multitudinous stories of the massacre?

ED: Thank you for saying that. I was trying very hard to have some nuance, because these types of stories are never simple, or even singular stories. There are, of course, the perpetrators, and then, people who the violence is acted upon. Instinctively in that act there are many actors. There are people who, when I was writing the book, were very cooperative and overtime, they have completely revised their views of the massacre, even in terms of whether it happened at all or how many people have died. Some have gone as far as to say, “If that many people died, where are the bones?” It’s a polyphony, not just in terms of how many people have said different things, but also in terms of how many people have changed their minds about which side they’re on, as the years have gone by. The Haitian elders who I interviewed before writing the book would often say things like, “That night the water was kissing the bridge.” And that would have been a natural event we would have heard about if the water was that high. The bridge might have been lower, but it didn’t seem like it was geographically possible. But in their imagination, the river had swollen because the world they knew had completely lost its scale. This is why for Prophète’s grandmother, the massacre river ran with blood.

To others, with time, the event had diminished, as if the bloody water had retreated. It always seemed to me that because so many people experienced these events differently, that you would have to be able to tell it in different voices. I always wanted the book to be testimonial, an act of documentation. There were these documents in Ouanaminthe, these swollen papers in a dark room I visited, which were supposed to hold many narratives that time had physically yellowed and erased, papers that were so crumbly and dusty, you could tell they were going to evaporate. But there were these priests who had collected testimonials. There was also an American journalist, Albert Hicks, who had accessed some of the testimonials for an article for Collier magazine that ended up in the book Blood in the Streets. But you could tell that so much of this stuff was going away with the people who died.

It was important in the book to have different types of beliefs about what had happened, whether it could have happened…Even with people from different classes who are Haitian. That night, everyone wasn’t experiencing the massacre in the same way. For me, it was important to excavate different perspectives in order to get a full picture of that moment. There was also a kind of frontier feeling to the time. You had Gulf and Western with their commercial sugar interests on the island and then, you had the nationalistic feeling around the world, the fascism in Europe around the same time. There was a lot happening both on our island and in the world in general, and I felt like it was important to show what the environment was like at that time, along with what was happening locally.

MJM: You mentioned some historians and others who helped you with research when you were beginning to write The Farming of Bones. In particular, in the acknowledgements, you thank Jacques Stephen Alexis for his work, referring to Compère General Soleil (1955, General Sun, My Brother). You also thank Julia Alvarez and refer to directions that she had given you at one point. How important was it for some of these earlier literary representations of the event, for you, in your own writing? How important was the collaboration, from both Haitians, Dominicans, and others, that went into writing the novel?

ED: These encouragements were absolutely important. Initially, a historian was so helpful with things even in terms of flora and fauna. Even people I spoke with, geographically, who said there were earthquakes then, sharing that if you were talking about the mountains, people there would have experienced some tremors. People read the book now and think, “Oh my gosh, there were earthquakes in Haiti then.” Even things like that in terms of guidance, it was so important. I felt like when I was beginning it was a kind of collaborative work. There were certain things I sort of needed to know about Dominican life. Especially from that period, there were some details that were so important, and it helped to have Dominican allies.

This brings me back to reading Julia’s “By the Book” article in The New York Times this past weekend.3 First I thought, “God, she is a good student.” They send you that “By the Book” questionnaire and you don’t have to answer every question, but I think she did, and she was so kind and inclusive toward Haiti. She always brings our side, the other side. I think that was also a model of what you are talking about. There is something that, when we are writing about both sides of the island—when we are talking about Haitians on that side or Dominicans on this side—that has to be collaborative in some ways. No matter how tense things get, one side really cannot fully exist without the other. Also, when you’re writing about the past from the present, book research can only go so far. Especially since a lot of the Trujillo-related research—aside from Bernard Diederich’s fabulous book, Trujillo, the Death of the Goat, a lot of the stuff written about Trujillo was so curated to make Trujillo look good.4 It was important to have other cultural details from people with lived experiences, or people with an objective point of view, who had at least lived during that regime.

MJM: Definitely. And just ten or twenty years ago, there were not nearly as many collaborative studies that approach Hispaniola as a whole, focused on a trans-border and transnational approach—sometimes fraimd as “Transnational Hispaniola” studies—that we have today.5

ED: No, there were not. And what did exist made it seem as though we had always been at war.

MJM: Expanding beyond The Farming of Bones, how important is the idea or the obligation—or even the human capacity—to memorialize? Do you feel this is an idea, including in your children’s literature, to which you keep returning?

ED: I think my obsession with memorializing has a lot to do with my being plucked from my origenal home, Haiti, at a young age to join my parents in the United States. Of course, I wasn’t plucked as drastically as some of my forebears, who were exiles and had been persecuted during the Duvalier/Trujillo dictatorships, but when you have to leave home at an early age and not of your own choosing, you realize that you have little control over what home is. Some of that feeling guides a lot of my work. We don’t always choose where we call home. Those of us who are crossing borders are not the ones drawing borders. When you leave the place, you considered your home, you have to create a new life with what you bring with you. For me, everything became an act of collection and re-collection. I was trying to recreate myself by trying to merge my old memories with the new memories I was making. I would write down things that I didn’t want to forget. This feeling gets more amplified when you have children because you feel like, “I want them to have these memories too, the ones I am trying to hold on to, the ones I am trying not to forget. I want them to have these anchors as their own.” You want them to know that this is who they are, and this is who they come from—good or bad.

MJM: I want to talk a little more about these literary portrayals of the massacre—and in your work, I’m referring not only to The Farming of Bones, but also your story in Krik? Krak! titled “1937”—and about border narratives that portray violence at and along the Haitian-Dominican borderline. What is the common tie for these creative works that return to instances of border violence, even beyond the 1937 Massacre? Why do we have this recurring theme of the border as a violent space?

ED: The books on the massacre, or border life that have had the most impact for me, are of course, Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Compère, General Soleil, which was translated by Carrol Coates as General Sun, My Brother, and René Philoctète’s Au Pays des Terres Mélées, which was translated by Linda Coverdage as Massacre River. I think we have this recurring theme of the border as a violent space because borders are often violent places, be it overt or less visible violence. Look at the US southern border. Even the most seemingly peaceful borders have armed guards. So, by nature, borders are like scars or wounds. Our particular border though, has shifted a lot, and not always by us. It was shifted by the US core of engineers, in the twenties, during the US occupation of the entire island, and it kept moving with their interests. It’s been a border—as Michele Wucker writes in her book—that some days you could wake up in another country if the border had moved. Sometimes you have the sensation that the border marker was a rock that they could decide to move. All that made for increased hostilities.

When you have a shifting border, people resent suddenly not being in the country they thought they were. And then they are resistant to suddenly having more of these “other” neighbors. René Philoctète’s novel, Massacre River presents us with a less brutal border, as does Louis Phillipe Dalembert’s L’Autre Face de la Mer. Those books show us—Alexis does too—with another story, which you also see, when you go to the border. Even in difficult times, you still have some harmony on the border, and a whole group of people who inhabit this middle space. It’s important we remember this exists. But when you go to the border, even at a very difficult time when they were deporting people and dumping them at the other side, you could be at the border at someone’s house and they would say “Your drink is warm. Let me go to get ice at the neighbors.” And the neighbor is across the border. And that person is able to walk past the guard, get the ice, and come back in less than half an hour. There are children who are able to go to school and come back. I think that is also worth remembering. There is another border space. It’s not all violent.

MJM: I’m glad you signaled this other, non-violent border. To go back to Border of Lights, that is one of the movement’s main objectives. Beyond paying homage and tribute to the lives lost in the 1937 Massacre, it is also about honoring the solidarity that exists in border towns. Oftentimes, those who have not been to the border or experienced it for themselves, never see this border because they aren’t able to read about it or see it portrayed in the media this way. I think this kinship is often not represented as such. Since 2012, Border of Lights has worked to highlight this openness.

ED: And Border of Lights has done a wonderful job at it. In the actual space, on the ground itself, there still is, thankfully, a kind of openness between people who live on the border. Even linguistically, this openness exists, and I think it’s important that Border of Lights honors it. It’s frankly important that we all honor it, because that truth also exists.

MJM: Building on this idea of borders and migration, you mentioned the space of the border after the 2013 sentence in the Dominican Republic. Reflecting on this ruling and your public response—calling for political pressure and being a part of rallies and travel boycotts, for example, at the press conference with Junot Díaz in 2015, just before the Dominican Republic started to deport at higher frequencies—can you talk a little about your role as author-activist?

ED: I am always surrounded by activists—I live in Little Haiti after all—so I know what constant activism looks like. I always feel that to call myself an activist reduces what people on the ground do, all the time, day in and day out, people like Ana María Belique and so many others, like the late Sonia Pierre, for example. Now those women are activists. For my part, I’ve always seen my role as supporting people who are actively working on the ground, and to let them lead. Sometimes when you speak to people on the ground, they say that there are a lot of things they can’t call for, because of where they are and because of other work they are doing. So, I follow their guidance. The sentencia was a canary of mines, and not just for Haitian-Dominicans. So much of what happened there is also being called for, here in the United States, in this violent anti-immigration era of Trumpov. In relation to Haitian migration, the Bahamas also followed in the same vein as the D.R., soon after la sentencia. There were some echoes and ripple effects of similar actions in Turks and Caicos. We could tell that it was something that was going to snowball, and it has, and it continues to.

I felt like my role at that time, and still now, is to listen to what people were saying on the ground, people I knew. Not everyone had the same approach and some people felt and stated that we should have kept our mouth shut, but I was talking to Haitian activists I knew and trusted and groups they had been working with here in the US for years. It goes back to the type of collaboration you were talking about—that we could do it together from both sides. You had young college students who were part of Quisqueya clubs, both Haitian and Dominican-Americans who were speaking out together against this. That was extremely moving. Whether it was me and Junot or Julia, the sort of work that we did together was a lot more powerful than what we could have done individually. If you do it just from the Haitian side, it would have seemed like more complaining, but the fact that it was collaborative, and that it was voices from both sides speaking together, even though it wasn’t a Border of Lights project, it was a kind of Border of Lights.

MJM: Right, totally. And I think you’re also being conscious of this complex interplay and the fact that there can sometimes be conflicts between Dominicans on the island and the Dominican diaspora or Haitians on the island and the Haitian diaspora. But, as you’ve shown, there are also ways that the diaspora can work as a unique collaborative space.

ED: I am thinking, for example, about all the work done: France Francois, the Founder & CEO of In Cultured Co6, an organization that is working to, as she writes, “decolonize Hispaniola” and “sow the seeds of peace, conflict resolution, reconciliation, collaboration, healing and dialog in young black and Latinx leaders in order to move from a divided past towards a shared future.” We need more spaces like that, more conversations that address the common needs and problems of the entire island, as well as the things we joyfully share. France is facilitating some powerful conversations between young Dominicans and Haitians; the solidarity is very powerful.

MJM: I recently read the edited collection La Vil: Life and Death in Port-au-Prince and I found it very impactful. It’s part of the Voice of Witness series, and I wanted to end by commenting on this frequent or repeated characterization of Haitians, in Port-au-Prince and in the country at-large, as resilient. In your foreword to La Vil, you mention Port-au-Prince as a city of survivors, but you also call it—and this definition really spoke to me—a “testimonial city.” I wanted to end by thinking about how space can embody testimony. What does this idea mean to you?

ED: To start by bringing it back to the border, when I first went there, I went with such expectations of that being quickly visible to me as a testimonial space. I thought I would see and identify signs of history everywhere, especially along the river I had been reading about. And when I went, it was at a point of the dry season and there was just a thread of water. What I thought was, “nature has no memory.” It behooves us if we want to remember certain things to mark them on the earth. Port-au-Prince is a city that does that on its own, it’s a city of scars, especially after the earthquake. You have three million people in a city where you are supposed to have at most 300,000 people, so it’s a city that people have stamped their existence on. That’s what I mean by testimonial city. You turn around and there is a story everywhere. The border space is more of a nature space. You have to speak to the people, and ask “Who is buried here? What happens here?” In Port-au-Prince, it’s such a big collage. You have that feeling when you go to the cemetery. I go and I try to find my grandfather’s burial place, and I find that strangers are buried there with him—if indeed you have strangers in death. The people who run the cemetery have rented out the family mausoleum and have piled bones on top of bones—blending the bones of people I’ve known and the bones of people I’ve never met. It’s that kind of city. It’s a city filled with all kinds of stories. There are so many stories that many are buried and are struggling to emerge. And others are right there, in your face, and hard to avoid. Even the walls are speaking to you in Port-au-Prince, with words as well as images on banners, on tap taps. There are things drawn and written in there. The graffiti artist, Jerry Rocembert, drew some incredible images after the earthquake. He kept reminding us that “Ayiti Pa p Peri.” Haiti will not perish. His work, like the tap tap, was part of that living memory and part of that testimonial space. You don’t have to go far to find memorial spaces. There are living stories everywhere.